At the end of Verdi’s “A Masked Ball,” the San Diego Opera’s most recent production at the Civic Theatre, the King is stabbed by his best friend.

Nobody comes to his aid or suggests he may be in need of medical attention. This is grand opera, where the most important thing is a noble death. King Gustav III forgives everyone in sight before he expires and the curtain falls.

Who knew that “A Masked Ball” was a portent for the San Diego Opera’s astonishing announcement last week? The 49-year-old company’s board voted Wednesday to close at the end of this season, and in the words of Ian Campbell, CEO and general and artistic director, “go out with dignity, on a high note with heads held high,” rather than succumbing to the alternative of slipping “into the night, leaving creditors and community in the lurch.”

This king, however, wasn’t stabbed. He was facing some serious — Campbell and his board would say terminal — fundraising and ticket-selling challenges to produce a 2015 season that was announced a few weeks ago.

Exactly how much additional funding the company would have needed to put on a celebratory, 50th anniversary season that would have included “La Boheme,” “Don Giovanni,” “Nixon in China,” “Tannhauser” and a mariachi opera is in question.

The opera has essentially run through a $10 million bequest from Joan Kroc that had provided as much as $1 million per season since 2003 and the company was drawing down its reserves. Campbell said last week the organization would need to raise an additional $10 million to continue for even one more season.

Yet, the San Diego Opera, with a 2013 operating budget of $16.3 million, ended its fiscal year in the black, even if it needed to tap into some of its investments to realize a positive bottom line and make its annual claim of a balanced budget. According to its audited financial statements for 2013, the San Diego Opera Association showed net assets of $15,653,159 as of June 30.

High costs
8% (162)

Decline in fan base
18% (346)

Decline in donations
4% (73)

All of the above
70% (1384)

1965 total votes.

There’s no accumulated deficit, typically the silent killer of arts organizations. And the company has the strong support of the city’s moneyed elite, who have provided the institution with hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.

“I was thunderstruck by the news,” said Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, the organization representing U.S. and Canadian opera companies.

“There are many companies that face more challenging circumstances that have worked to engender support from their boards and support from the community, companies that have embraced new artistic strategies to create community excitement.”

The San Diego Opera is the third largest cultural institution in San Diego, an employer of hundreds of musicians, artisans and administrators, a significant contributor to San Diego’s burgeoning “creative economy,” and one of the stars in the civic crown that allows San Diego to make the claim it is a world-class city.

This is an opera company, not an opera. Why is the San Diego Opera pursuing a noble end rather than finding a way to survive?

In Scorca’s estimation, the board made a choice, one that is implicit in Campbell’s statement about going out with dignity:

“There was a choice in their view between a challenging and potentially unsuccessful future, and closing down now before those challenges are manifest.

“The choice to close down now suggests that there was no clear vision about how to achieve success in the future.”

Grand aspirations

Few have accused Campbell of lacking vision, even if that vision is producing opera on a grand scale using artists of international stature. It’s a vision whose viability has become increasingly untenable over the last decade, but in its most uncompromising form has always been challenging.

When Campbell arrived in San Diego in 1983, his first task was to clean up the financial mess left by another man with a grand vision, Tito Capobianco, who had replaced founding director Walter Herbert when he died suddenly in 1975.

Capobianco is still remembered for bringing big stars to San Diego, even if Placido Domingo, Beverly Sills, Norman Treigle and Joan Sutherland all sang with the company during Hebert’s decidedly calmer decade-long tenure.

Capobianco doubled down on Herbert’s star inclinations, and the board was unable to keep up. When Capobianco resigned in 1982 (and went on to spend 17 very successful years as general director of the Pittsburgh Opera), the company was in financial chaos, and Campbell, an assistant artistic administrator at the Metropolitan Opera, proved to be the right man to restore order.

He canceled performers’ contracts, got rid of Capobianco’s beloved Verdi Festival, cleaned up the company’s finances, and established a cooperative relationship with the board. As a result, according to the San Diego Opera’s official history, the company has “achieved a balanced budget every year since.”

Among his first hires was Ann Spira as development director. She would soon become his partner in life and his partner in running the opera, a role finally recognized when she was named deputy general director in 2013, the same year the couple separated.

Unlike Capobianco, Campbell often trumpeted the company’s financial stability, perhaps in part to distinguish the opera from the San Diego Symphony, which also performed at the Civic Theatre since its opening in 1965. The symphony during the ’80s and ’90s always seemed to be on the brink, and sometimes over the brink, of financial disaster.

Campbell would even announce from the Civic Theatre stage that the company had balanced its budget. The crowd would respond with applause, as if one of the company’s tenors had just nailed a high C.

But Campbell not only knew his way around a balance sheet, he knew how to produce grand opera and he made the San Diego Opera the kind of mini-Met that would have made Capobianco proud. And at times, it was not so mini.

Campbell had an uncanny ear for developing voices and he cast at an international level, bringing artists to San Diego like Ferruccio Furlanetto, Jane Eaglen, Vivica Genaux and Richard Leech.

“So many artists began their rise to stardom in front of the San Diego audience,” Leech said. “There is not a single young emerging artist that does not have San Diego Opera on the top of his or her wish list. From the U.S. to Europe and Asia to Australia they know that San Diego Opera is often the first to find and bring an emerging artist to the States, not coincidentally, just before their career takes off.”

Operatic challenges

Campbell’s performance impressed the board enough that it renewed his contract every few years until 1998, when it signed him to a 14-year agreement, assuring that he would be with the company through 2012, the year he turned 65.

At the same time, with the opera seemingly flush from a $1 million grant from Joan Kroc, Campbell and his wife were launching their biggest production yet: a waterfront performing arts center and opera house at the foot of Broadway that would cost as much as $400 million and be akin to the landmark Sydney Opera House in Campbell’s native Australia.

The idea had enough potential to prompt the City Council to contribute $50,000 toward a $120,000 feasibility study, and Kroc, who 10 years earlier had helped underwrite the city’s Soviet Arts Festival, reportedly was open to paying for a substantial portion of the performing arts center.

But the concept ultimately went nowhere, although Kroc left the company a $10 million bequest in 2003 that would prove critical to those balanced budgets. The opera’s fate remained inexorably linked with the Civic Theatre, which even in the late-’90s was a rapidly aging, cavernous facility that the city showed little interest in redeveloping.

While other cultural institutions — whether the symphony, which by then had moved to Symphony Hall, or the Old Globe — had their own buildings, the opera remained a renter. It had no physical structure on which to affix donor names, which was a significant challenge to its fundraising efforts.

Still, it continued its succession of “balanced budgets” and soon after the San Diego Symphony’s revival a decade ago, forged an agreement with the orchestra to use it for opera productions, providing five weeks of essential employment to the symphony’s musicians.

Even as the economy was roiled by the economic downturn starting in 2007, the San Diego Opera found a way to keep its budget balanced by reducing its season from five productions to four productions, a move typical among its peer opera companies.

But the San Diego Opera, and the opera world in general, had entered the vortex. Especially in its grandest form, opera is the most expensive of the performing arts. Consequently, it demands the highest ticket prices and is also the most vulnerable to economic uncertainty.

There was a virtual litany of U.S. opera company failures: Orange County’s Opera Pacific and the Baltimore Opera in 2008; Connecticut Opera in 2009; Cleveland Opera in 2010; Opera Boston in 2011; Opera San Antonio in 2012; the New York City Opera in 2013.

For those that survived, including San Diego, ticket sales went into decline and donors proved increasingly challenging to reach. But many opera companies, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, found a way to not only survive, but to reinvent the “grand opera” concept that weighed them down.

“If you look at Dallas, a company that has always been budgetarily very similar to the San Diego Opera, it was faced with much more severe circumstances,” said Opera America’s Scorca. “It was a company that had tremendous deficits and very little cash on hand with major outstanding lines of credit to the bank.

“It had a general director with a really sharp eye for analysis and a clear communications strategy. He reduced the number of productions in the short term to help balance the budget, launched in the same year HD transmissions to the local sports stadium to build community awareness (among other innovative programming), and galvanized the board and donor community.

“And the company next year is going back to its five-production schedule.”

End game

In San Diego, Campbell was uncompromising in his dedication to the grand opera model. On occasion the company would do a contemporary work, whether a provocative, 2007 production of Berg’s “Wozzeck” directed by the La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff or its co-premiere of Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick.”

Among its future plans, had it stayed in business, was a coproduction with Dallas Opera of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s “Great Scott,” which would be directed by former Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien.

But the season was still comprised of large-scale, main-stage operas, even if some of them were written more recently.

His donors, Campbell said last week, wouldn’t accept anything less, and he dismissed the idea of “chamber opera” with less experienced singers, reiterating the company’s commitment to quality.

In the name of sustaining that quality, Campbell has resisted any degree of downsizing or restructuring the company, or even any significant amount of budget cutting.

Given the labor-intensive nature of opera, salaries and compensation form more than two-thirds of the company’s budget. In the same year as the recession started taking its toll, 2008, Campbell’s total compensation (salary plus other benefits) increased 67 percent from $383,250 to $563,895, according to Federal 990 forms, peaking at $695,756 in 2010.

With the opera’s second highest paid employee, Campbell’s then-wife Ann Spira Campbell, they received a total of $4.6 million between 2008 and 2012. Ian Campbell is under contract through 2017, but he said his attorney had advised him not to comment about whether the company, in honoring its commitments, would be paying him through 2017.

That compensation, of course, is approved by the board, and Campbell has always said that it is the board driving the company’s decisions. Board members adore Campbell. Last year, the board launched a fund drive to honor him for 30 years at the opera and rasied $120,000.

Campbell and the board seem to speak with a single voice, to the point where some board members and staff question whether a diversity of ideas was welcome, especially at this critical time.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around this because it’s very confusing,” said Carlos Cota, business manager of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 122. It has approximately 100 members working for the opera both at the Civic Theatre and in the opera’s scene studio, which builds sets for other opera companies and arts organizations.

His members are among the hundreds of employees and small businesses who depend at least in part on the opera for their livelihood.

“In the arts community, we do whatever we need to do, whenever we are called upon to do it,” Cota said. “It’s a partnership. And we never received a phone call, ‘Hey, we need to tighten up.’ Maybe on some little thing, but nothing like, ‘We need to save the opera.’

“We weren’t given that opportunity. None of us.”

Perhaps in his estimation, there’s nothing that can be done to save what he sees as a first-class, traditional opera company; and if it can’t fulfill that mission, then shut the doors with dignity and integrity.

But Campbell has been in this situation before.

When he started in San Diego in 1983, he faced a divided board, he told the San Diego Tribune in a 1989 interview. Some were ready to follow his leadership, and others still clung to Capobianco’s vision.

“This is where, in a sense, we show our lack of sophistication as a community,” he said in 1989. “We don’t recognize that change is the way things work.”

As for those who didn’t want change: “That group behaved as though it didn’t want opera anymore,” Campbell said.

Fortunately, Campbell was there to convince them to choose opera, to give them a vision of a creative, viable future.

Now, 31 years later, Campbell is the one marching them toward a noble death.